Web Development for Beginners - Key Concepts, Roles and Tools

Become a web developer is a hard path to take, most of the time we don’t know how to start something and when you are new at this all the concepts came suddenly and it’s hard to get everything. This article is oriented to the people that want to become a web developer, but if you already started to learn maybe you want to take a look at all the points.

Before to start I want to talk about why this is important, I start to code when I was 17, now I have 27, but in those ten years I was not constant the last 2 years I decide to become a full-stack web developer and I realize that there are many concepts there that if I have learned before I would have saved more years. So, let’s go to the point.

1. Frontend developer

This is the guy that gets a draw of the website and translates that in code to make everything functional and pretty, the languages of the frontend are HTML, CSS, and Javascript, at least talking about the basics. The frontend developer also provides an interface that helps the user interact with the data.

2. Backend developer

Shortly is the man in charge of save the data, the backend developer provides some protocols to the frontend developer to save, process and get the data. there are many languages that you can learn and the most popular for the backend are, Java, Php, NodeJs, Ruby, Python.

3. Full-stack developer

This is divided is composed of 2 parts frontend and backend developer. But why divide this? Like I already said there is a server where the data is stored (backend), the other part is your computer, and most specifically your browser(frontend), there are more things about frontend and backend, but talking about web development this is the basic.

4. Server

Literally is a supercomputer in some parts of the world, here is the data storage(data, music, videos, etc..), and is the reason that you can open Facebook in your device and your computer and your photos are always in available.

5. Client

Is who asks the server for the data, the browser(Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer), for example, got the data that you are reading in this article, your Facebook or WhatsApp apps asking for messages to the server, or even your tv showing the movie that you like.

6. Language

Is the language(code) that say to the computer what to do.

7. Framework

It is a language based on another language, with a lot of functions and parameters to make the work easy and understandable for a complete team of developers.

8. Operating System

It’s the system that every device has, In the computers, there are Windows, macOS and a lot of Linux distributions, in the smartphones is android, iPhone Os, etc..

9. Terminal/Console

It’s a powerful tool where you put commands to do tasks in a faster way than the graphic interphase, it is also a headache to learn at the beginning.

10. Version Control

It’s the most important tool to work with a team, and definitely you have to learn one, you can keep the track of your code with this tool, the most popular are git and svn, you can learn git for free git with GitHub.

Saying this you have to learn about 6 languages, 2 frameworks, 1 version control and maybe more than one operating system to be in the play, but believe me, it's always nice to learn more.

These are pretty basic concepts and I would have liked to know this in the past. Today to learn is easy and everything is on the internet. I hope this can help you to know a little bit about the scene, and remember to always keep learning.